The idea of a simple two way split seems relentlessly attractive to the human mind and it's tempting to try and define this whole thing in terms of Old and New, or perhaps East and West, or even to suggest some inherent cultural and political pair of opposites.

Unfortunately for us, things are just never that simple. Comparisons can be made but really only over specifics and only by baring in mind the limits of such an exercise. There are no definitive rules as to how ideas are group together. The advantage of this of course is that there's nothing to stop us picking and choosing ideas to form any kind of system we like.

The second advantage the older systems have over our own concerns the way in which they view the relationship between people and the planet. I spent a little time in Australia a few years ago and while I was there a guy was launching a controversial book he had written.

As I understood it the premise of this book was that at some early point in their history, the Aboriginal people of what we now call Australia had ravaged the land and hunted several species to extinction. From this experience, he argued, they had developed to the more familiar idea of a people at one with their environment.

Of course this pissed a lot of people off but, without knowing a great deal about the subject, it seemed to make sense to me. Over several millennia these people learned from their mistakes to arrive at a balanced and sustainable system of living. This notion also gives me some hope that maybe we can all do something similar somewhere in the future.

Anyway, however it came to be, these systems consider people to be a part of nature just like all the plants, animals, rocks and water. From this mindset it is easy to see how you would come to a system whereby, through understanding and respecting your surroundings, your lifestyle works with nature and is thereby sustainable.

In contrast, our structured faiths place mankind above the rest of 'creation', we are special, we are superior, we are the masters of all we survey. I'm currently still reading 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee', a Native American history of the American West, and the concept of 'manifest destiny' has been mentioned several times.

Besides sounding startlingly like white supremacy, preaching that the dominance of the 'Anglo-Saxon race' is god's will, it also states in no uncertain terms that the vast land before them, and in particular the mineral wealth beneath it, is there for no reason other than to be consumed by humanity.

The move from part of nature to nature's master has cost us a great deal but surely the highest cost of all was the loss of common ground. Looking at ancient cultures, belief systems and ways of life that came before the structured, monotheistic religions, the global similarities are amazing.

When our respective corners of the world were at the very heart of our lives and communities, we all had something in common and it was in all our interests to work with nature to progress as we wanted to. The loss of this shared cornerstone has allowed societies to define themselves through less common practices and thereby develop greater differences and conflicts.